76 they are born, the chicks at nighttime go for the light. The children have collected twelve hundred and fifty in a day, more than sixteen thousand in a season. Touching is the scene when the chicks are released, but as adults they are caught and eaten. A chef in town is a master of hot smoked puffin -a taste that marries corned beef to kippered herring. Burgundy flesh is in the puffed-up chest of a puffin. It is served with new potatoes and sweet thin slices of pickle. Under the lava is Olafshus, home of the late Er lend ur Jonsson, master catcher of puffins. Olafshus had terri- torial rights to Alfsey, which is two miles from Heimaey. He and a crew of three or four sat in high niches in the dizzying cliffs of Alfsey) and with long-handled nets caught puffins in flight. In a four-week season, Erlendur would be content if he re- turned to Olafsh us, and his wife, Olafia, with twelve thousand puffins. Olafshus went very quickly under the lava. The puffin is among the nation's emblematic birds. With its bright- white chest, its orange webbed feet, and its big orange scimitar bill, it could be an iced toucan. The cost of cooling the lava was one and a half million dollars. The lava brought more than thirty million dollars' worth of heating to the town, and harbor improvements worth a great deal more. Heimaey had lacked paving material. With the new tephra, the airport runways were widened and lengthened, and streets were freshly surfaced allover town. It is said on the mainland that people of Vestman- naeyjar are sensitive about the in- frabooty they got from the volcano- about their favored-nation status with regard to the Catastrophe Fund. They are not receptive to banter on this topic. As a mainlander noted, "you say that once, and not again." The American pumps arrived in the tenth week of the eruption. To shoot water thirty feet into the air, almost any strong pump will do. If you want five hundred vertical feet, you need unusually specialized ordnance, and these machines had come out of a mili- tary warehouse at two and a half tons the unit, accompanied by papers call- ing them invasion pumps. There were nineteen. They were of the generation that was developed to move gasoline from offshore ships to Omaha Beach. Their aggregate maximum output was thirteen thousand gallons a minute. In a two-stage procedure, they were supported by suction pumps, drawing water from the harbor they were try- ing to save. Altogether, about forty pumps were lined up in ranks on a broad quay, whIch came to resemble a natural-gas field or an oil refinery, with large pipes in parallel clusters and valves controlled by wagon wheels. The water went off the quay, through the town, and up on top of the lava, where steel pipes and aluminum pipes had been broken so often by the restive basalt that Valdimar Jonsson, who by now was in charge of the design engineering, risked the flam- mability of flexible plastic. Protected from within by the cold water, the plastic did not melt. Altogether, he soon had seven miles of working pipe, most of it up on the flow, discharging water directly onto the lava through diameters the size of dinner plates. The system pumped as much as twenty-three million gallons a day. The water ran downhill in simmering brooks. The invasion pumps cooled the lava for a hundred and three days. On April 22nd, Easter Sunday-about three weeks after they began-a new lava current emerged from the crater that was thinner and faster, and there- fore less predictable, than any that had come before. It bubbled. It surged. It seemed to come forth at a rolling boil. It ran east) fortunately, and veered south. Swiftly, it entered the sea. It was truly a red river-broad, fast, braided-moving like a big arctic stream. It flowed for more than two months. The greater part of it contin- ued to flow east, building a new plat- form of about a hundred acres into and far above the sea. Some of it went north, in the direction of the harbor and the town, and ran into a very large reception of pumped salt water. Valdimar said, "At each place we cooled, it was just like putting a nail through the lava. After three days, we would move the pipe thirty metres, and drive another nail. If more lava came, we were ready. We had put up our piping system to within two hundred metres of the crater . We were ready to take on new bursts." When Valdimar was called in to set up the high-pressure pumps, he had been Professor of Thermal Fluids in the Engineering Department of the University of Iceland for less than six months. He had taught at Imperial College in London. He had taught at Penn State. His Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota. He grew up in Hnifsdal ur , a fishing village of three hundred people in northwest Iceland, where his father was a car- penter, his forebears fishermen. He is a large-boned lumberjack of a man with deep-blue eyes and dark, swept-back hair. During the V estmannaeyj ar eruption, his varied professorial com- mitments caused him now and again to disappear. After the first three weeks of attacking the lava with the new invasion pumps-during the early part of which he slept three hours a night -he went off to Penn State, where he led a seminar called Volcano in Town. As each new road was built on the lava, it would move and be replaced, move and be replaced, until the lat- eral motion stopped. In Thorbjorn's words, "Y ou could see that the lava was stopping, and you could extend the pipes. W e moved closer to the crater, moved gradually up there- from place to place, a week at a time, just letting water pour out on the lava. If you look near the volcano, the sur- face there now is extremely rough. Close to the crater, the flow movement was fast. With the cooling, you create huge blocks of solid matter that move on the lava stream and turn over. " When ice forms in the Yukon River, it makes huge blocks that move on the stream and turn over. Eventually, they jam-piled one upon another in a stilled surface that is mountainous and rough. If the Easter Flow had gone more north than east it would have over-